Taivutusaffiksit

Taivutusaffiksit, or inflectional affixes, are suffixes that attach to word stems to mark grammatical information. In Finnish, they are a core part of the language’s morphology, allowing nouns, adjectives and verbs to express case, number, person, tense and mood without changing the word stem radically. They differ from derivational affixes, which create new words or change lexical category.

Nouns and adjectives use taivutusaffiksit to indicate case and number. Common forms include talon (genitive), talossa (inessive), taloon (illative), and taloja (partitive plural). The noun’s stem combines with various endings to produce singular and plural forms across multiple cases. Adjectives take the same endings as the nouns they modify, so they agree in number and case with the noun.

Verbs employ taivutusaffiksit to mark person and number in the present tense, for example puhun, puhut, puhuu, puhumme, puhutte, puhuvat. Past tense forms show suffixal patterns such as puhin? Wait, puhuin, puhuit, puhui illustrate how past forms add person-specific endings to a past marker. Finnish also uses suffixes to express mood (indicative, conditional, potential) and aspect in finite verb forms. The negative construction uses ei plus the verb in the short present form, as in en puhu.

Finnish vowel harmony influences the specific variants of many suffixes, and consonant gradation can affect the stem before the endings appear. Taivutusaffiksit are productive and central to Finnish grammar, enabling a compact expression of grammatical relationships through endings attached to stems rather than separate words.